History of Match 3
The combined lifetime revenue of the big Match 3 games is $24 Bil. 🤑 and 5 Bil. downloads 🤯 on mobile. We covered the 13 years long evolution in our most longest and comprehensive episode yet 😎 looking at the top grossing games in the current charts.
The overall trend of the market suggest it is an elite club as during the last 3 years there are no new games with critical scale as Laura pointed out. Space Ape Games‘s Chrome Valley Customs, released in 2023, being the most successful one with $40 Mil. lifetime revenue. To get a comparison, Dream Games‘s Royal Match was doing $20. Mil. a month 1 year after release, currently $120 Mil. per month 😅 and even King‘s Candy Crush is still making $80 Mil. a month, being a 13 years old game 👵. Having a great game is not enough anymore, so what is happening?
A lot of these games are using very specific forms of User Acquisition. All of the Playrix‘s games for instance, have their pin puzzle 📍 creatives integrated into the onboarding, using it on every second level for a long time. Its fully integrated, polished and even difficulty balanced. Royal Match has “save the king” level on every 5th level in its whole level funnel. Again translating the acid, spikes, lava action from its creatives directly into the product. Even Candy Crush started using similar creatives, but we are still waiting for the integration into onboarding. It seems these UA tactics became mandatory in order to lower 📉 the CPI cost of this very competitive category.
Metagame systems also heavily evolved during this period. It started with a simple saga of levels and then it moved into restoration and decoration of environments. The restoration was also dropped in the latest evolutions as why would you need double the assets if you can cut it into half and instead of restoring you are just building on a nice blank slate. This is what Royal Match and Kingdom are doing, where this is smoothly streamlined now.
Thanks again Laura Taranto, for joining the pod and sharing a lot of your Puzzle Queen 👑 expertise, looking forward to next one 😁. Join us as we talk about all of this with Matej 🦩 doing a Creative memory lane and Felix showing the secrets of Candy Crush ads 😱.
Data based on Sensor Tower, thanks for the support 🤗
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